The career they chose naturally puts them in risky situations, and just showing up for work can make them targets. On Thursday, two sheriff’s deputies eating in a Florida restaurant were shot and killed for no apparent reason other than their uniforms.

Yet that fear, that sense of danger may be growing exaggerated among some police officers in some places, at some times, and getting other people killed.

Teachers are walking out again, this time shutting down campuses in 90 or more school districts across Arizona. Gov. Doug Ducey claims to be puzzled: He endorsed a plan to give teachers raises that would add up to a 20% pay increase over the next three years. Why would teachers walk out now?

Surely part of the reason is that teachers in Arizona know a concession on pay isn’t the same thing as a genuine commitment to public education. State leaders like Ducey are so dead set on privatizing education or spending school funds elsewhere that they are ready to change any rules — even longstanding constitutional and democratic norms — to further that agenda.

When D. Nichole Davis decided to go to law school, the firm where she worked as a paralegal rallied around her, handwriting letters of support.

Nearly 70 years earlier, Sarah Leverette faced a slightly different environment, periodically parrying inquiries from a law school dean incredulous that she remained enrolled.

Both women persevered through individual challenges to establish successful careers, and both recently received the University of South Carolina School of Law’s highest honor.

Davis received a 2018 Compleat Lawyer silver award, while Leverette received platinum recognition. The awards, established in 1992, are given in three categories: platinum (31 years or more in practice), gold (16 to 30 years) and silver (15 years or less).

One April morning in 2016, Daryl Carpenter, a charter boat captain out of Grand Isle, La., took some clients to catch redfish on a marsh pond that didn’t use to exist. Coastal erosion and rising seas are submerging a football field’s worth of Louisiana land every hour, creating and expanding ponds and lakes such as the one onto which Carpenter had piloted his 24-foot vessel.

Teacher strikes are generating a healthy focus on how far public education funding has fallen over the past decade. The full explanation, however, goes beyond basic funding cuts. It involves systematic advantages in terms of funding, students and teachers for charter schools and voucher programs as compared to traditional public schools. Increasing public teacher salaries may end the current protests, but speaking as an expert in education law and policy, I believe it won’t touch the new normal in which public education is no longer many states’ first priority.

My forthcoming research shows that, from funding and management practices to teacher and student policies, states are giving charter schools and private schools a better deal than public schools. These better deals have fueled enormous growth in charter schools and voucher programs that is now nearly impossible to unwind.